We invited the Directors of the British Schools of Archaeology and History abroad to give us a short account of the works of their schools during 1963, as they kindly did for us in 1962 (ANTIQUITY, 1963, 36). We print these in the order of the establishment of the schools, namely Athens (1886), Rome (1901), Jerusalem (1919), Iraq (1932), Ankara (1948), East Africa (1960) and Iran (1961). We are this year, and we hope in future years, adding to this list a report on the work of the Egypt Exploration Society, which, though it has no school in the form of bricks and mortar, yet antedates all the others by three years, in the form of the Egypt Exploration Fund founded in 1883.

The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial, with its great store of treasure from the early Kingdom of East Anglia, was discovered and excavated in 1939, between May and 26th August. That is now twenty-five years ago. Eight days after the work's determinedly unhurried close, the country was at war. Jubilee reminiscence of those extraordinary weeks has had no space, till now, to spare for the almost miraculous alliance of fine weather with human enterprise and skill, which gave us from Suffolk this 'finest archaeological discovery ever made in Great Britain, perhaps in Europe' [I]. The roll of fame is nevertheless well known, and was rehearsed last year by Mr Charles Green in his book on the discovery [2]: Mrs Edith Pretty, the landowner, author of the enterprise, and donor of the whole find to the nation; Basil Brown and his chief Guy Maynard of Ipswich Corporation Museum; the fuller muster of talent assembled soon beside them, under Mr C . W. Phillips, for the Office of Works (as the Ministry then was called), among which the names Piggott, Grimes and Crawford stand out especially; and the late Commander Hutchison, R.N., then of the Science Museum, who drew the lines of the 85-foot ship.

Professor Paolo Graziosi is Professor of Anthropology in the University of Florence, and also Director of the Istituto di Paletnologia in that University. He here describes new discoveries of rock paintings which he saw in Ethiopia in 1961, and relates these discoveries and earlier ones from that country to prehistoric European and African art in general. In order to allow space to illustrate this article as fully as possible, it is being published in two parts. The rock art of the Adi Caieh and Karora regions will be described in the September number of ANTIQUITY, together with Professor Graxiosi’s discussion of Ethiopian rock art as a whole.

The tradition of Greek thought with which we are concerned here is quite different from the mythology that preceded it, and, as it develops, has to contend with philosophical and literary traditions no less sophisticated than itself, but inspired by other interests than scientific curiosity. It treats occasionally of human physique in a manner which is scientifically interesting, but does not anywhere, in my opinion, present a theory of man's physical evolution from animal ancestors. It foreshadows much of the speculation about cultural progress which has been current during the last 150 years, touching also on the origins of religion and language, Its rather scanty remains represent a period of seven or eight centuries, the same during which medicine and some other branches of science were actively pursued or initiated by the Greeks.

The find was made in June 1963 at a alongside a steep path which climbs from the valley floor near Tal-y-llyn on the west side of Nant Cader through part of the Cader Idris Estate of Idris Ltd., the soft drink manufacturers, which has lately been made over to the Nature Conservancy to preserve its natural beauties and prevent flooding of the country around Tal-y-llyn. The finders were Mr and Mrs Arthur Jones of Llanbadarn Fawr, Aberystwyth, who were picnicking alongside the path and happened to notice some pieces of sheet-bronze which were only half-buried in a shallow deposit of silt in a small cavity beneath a large boulder which projects from the mountainside, propped up by two small boulders. Through their good offices, the pieces were examined first by members of the Royal Commission on Ancient Monuments in Wales at Aberystwyth, and finally at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. The owners of the land, Idris Ltd., have now consented to place the find on permanent loan in the National Museum of Wales.

A book slender in size but rich in content. Certainly it should be read by Europeans and Africans who are interested in the historic problems of Zimbabwe ruins with or without a mystery attached, yet have neither time or training to tackle the detailed publication of the 1958 excavations by Summers and his two colleagues, which appeared in December 1961 as an Occasional Paper (vol. 3) of the National Museum of Southern Rhodesia, and is, in the main, a concentrated and masterly exercise in stratigraphy.

During and immediately after the 1939-45 war archaeology in China was practically at a standstill. With the world quietening down once more, the study of the human past began again to make a tremendous spurt forward. From Siberia through Western Asia and Africa to Central America excavation began everywhere. China, where the culture of Eastern Asia was born, was no exception. Before the war there was only a handful of archaeologists in the Chinese field. They were either enthusiasts from abroad or graduates of Harvard or London who worked on a few limited sites or some ancient tombs which had been discovered by accident. In the last fifteen years the situation has been greatly altered. Hundreds of young archaeologists have been trained in the universities as well as in permanent quarters erected close to the important sites under the direction of the Institute of Archaeology. They are organized into field teams that can be sent to any part of the country to co-operate with local workers. They work in the field and produce their reports by group discussion.

Painted caves are numerous in this region, particularly in the Coaito highlands. Let us consider some of the most important sites.

Verulamium was the third largest city in Roman Britain (200 acres within the walls). Its place in the Roman province was thus commensurate with the part it has played in modern assessments of the history and culture of Roman Britain. The excavations undertaken between 1930 and 19-34 by Dr and Mrs R. E. M. Wheeler were amongst the first scientific excavations of Roman towns in this country, and their report was certainly the first to interpret the results gained in the wider context of the history of the Roman Empire. Those deductions were thereupon utilized by Collingwood as a framework for the history of urbanization in Britain as a whole and have coloured interpretation ever since. Yet of the 200 acres of Verulamium only 11 had been investigated and those in an area thought to be peripheral. Today, therefore, at the conclusion of a second campaign (1955-61) when another, more central, area has been excavated and when the acreage investigated has increased to 20, it is justifiable to reassess the history of the town.

The Australian continent was peopled during the Pleistocene epoch. Positive evidence for this migration is lately emerging from that limbo known to archaeologists as (suspense account', a void into which many oddments have been shot over the years. Probably the most exotic claims were coincident with Dubois' revelation of Pithecanthropus in Java, when Australian optimists exhibited casts of the imprints left by (human' feet and buttocks, in allegedly Pliocene dune limestone from Victoria. This prompted Otto Schoetensach, progenitor of Homo heidelbergensis, to pronounce Australia as the probable focus of human evolution; both he and H. Klaatsch saw, in aboriginal techniques of tree-climbing, direct vestiges of arboreal ancestry [I].

Dr Libby's article was directed to examining the probable accuracy of the biophysical assumptions involved in the radiocarbon method of dating. His method was to show in a series of tables how the radiocarbon content of samples of tested ancient material deviated from the specific radiocarbon content of biosphere carbon calculated for the dates assigned to these samples on 'historical' evidence. Hitherto, radiocarbon dates have normally been presented as a check on those arrived at by 'historical' methods; here Dr. Libby uses 'historical' dates to control the accuracy of the radiocarbon method. His article, though of deep interest to archaeologists and ancient historians, is thus primarily addressed to his fellow scientists. Before following Dr Libby's lead unreservedly, they will wish to know the relative strength and validity of the alleged 'historical' datings [I].